Recently, the Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas published a warning that was also a clear signal: The arrival of A.I. may forever alter our relationship to nature. The zoo’s post showed stills from a TikTok video in which an otter clambered over the fence of his enclosure and jumped into the arms of a little boy, who took him into a heartwarming embrace. “He’s so slippery,” the boy in the video exclaims; his dad declares that it’s “the coolest thing.” It’s the stuff of storybooks and cartoons: animals breaking free from their cages. It’s also fiction — it was an A.I.-generated video, the otter a figment of machine imagination.
The zoo warned that videos like this might lead to “distorted expectations” of animal behavior: “When you see wild animals acting like pets or performing humanlike behaviors, it becomes easier to forget that they have complex needs that can’t be met in someone’s backyard.” If people see more and more of these imaginary scenarios, the zoo cautioned, they will be disappointed when otters don’t jump into their arms — when they turn out not to be surreal avatars who enact scenes from our imagination, but instead just otters.
These fake videos are suddenly everywhere: In one, a bear lumbers menacingly toward an unsuspecting young boy, only to be fought off by a heroic tuxedo cat. In another, a coyote and cat goof around. In a video that fooled swaths of the internet, bunnies jumped on a trampoline at night. Many style themselves as surveillance footage, which adds to the aura of authenticity. You have to be looking for particular falsities to tell them apart from real videos: phantom limbs, movements that are either jerky or overly smooth, something disappearing suddenly from the frame.
Compared with other, more manipulative A.I. content, fake animal videos seem relatively benign. What are they really for? Imagining animals’ inner lives, while they interact with us or one another, is a longstanding human urge; we want to see the cat defeat the bear and the bunnies have fun when we’re asleep. On the subway recently, I sat next to an older man watching an obviously (to me) fake video of a friendly polar bear nuzzling a human — did he know it was fake? Did he care? Later, I asked an A.I. chatbot to explain itself. Why are people so into these videos? It responded with eerie frankness: Sometimes people want to see a scenario that’s “too good to be true.”
But the truth was already good. Real animals are miraculous, a great marvel of the world — a fact so obvious that they’ve populated videos on the internet from their rudimentary beginnings. Animals doing unexpected and wonderful things on camera was some of the original viral content: An owl fights a snake; a seal slaps a kayaker with an octopus; in one of the most classic examples, a dog skateboards. These animals did things that stretched the imagination, maybe even things that seemed a little human. But we were content to see those similarities play out in reality. Now, with A.I.-generated videos, we are deciding what counts as miraculous; copycat A.I. owls fight snakes with storybook valor. Have we become numb to the wonder of the real animals? (Bad news if so — in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” it’s Satan who can take no joy in the new creatures God has created, leaving him “undelighted” by “all delight.”)
The zoo in Kansas was correct that our appetites for A.I. content have distorted our perceptions of reality. Recently, videos of a 7-month-old Japanese macaque named Punch, at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan, began circulating widely. Punch had a natural plotline: After being abandoned by his mother soon after birth and raised by zookeepers, he began clinging to a stuffed orangutan for comfort; he has had trouble reintegrating with other monkeys at the zoo, and viewers all over the world have watched, rapt, as he has been bullied by members of his troop and retreated to his toy, then cheered when another monkey gave him a long-awaited hug. We’re projecting onto him, as usual, our human fears and feelings about bullying and belonging. But I noticed that people online, having seen so many A.I.-generated videos, were skeptical that an animal with such pathos could be real. Then the feed flooded with videos of Punch that were A.I., some showing him taking dramatic revenge on his bullies. When nature behaves in ways that don’t reflect our desires — when it’s cruel or harsh — A.I. can help us retreat from reality, wrest it back into our control and extend its happenings into fantasy.
Like the Kansas zoo, I am alarmed by A.I. animal videos, but I was curious about making one myself. On a popular basic tool for creating them, you can type in a prompt and it will spit out a video for you. So I prompted one to create a video showing a cat wearing a small suit playing a piano, looking very serious, in a luxurious concert hall. There he appeared, seconds later, looking 3-D, photoreal, and doing just what I had asked. I tried again, with an auto-generated prompt: a tiny puppy wearing oversize headphones, nodding to music while sitting in front of a laptop, appeared. I turned the puppy into a golden retriever, and so on. The magic of this process had almost nothing to do with animals as we know them, but rather with how I could conjure them, play God (or Satan), a Creator orchestrating alien animal encounters. The cat and the puppy were cute and funny, sure, but I had never felt more estranged from nature.
Sophie Haigney is a writer. She is working on a book about our obsession with collecting — why and how we accumulate objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers.
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